Ampere Computing 2024 Roadmap Update: 256 Core 3nm CPU In 2025

Ampere is claiming performance-per-rack leadership over AMD EPYC Genoa and Bergamo, but again there haven't been any independent AmpereOne benchmarks yet. One area to point out and praise: Ampere Computing continues to do their tests atop the upstream GCC compiler. There's been the AmpereOne support within GCC and LLVM/Clang (and the upcoming Ampere-1B processors) and that is what they are relying on. Ampere Computing isn't maintaining their own downstream compilers like Intel and AMD or anything like that. From that perspective, it's great seeing hardware vendors use upstream GCC or LLVM/Clang.

Some additional claims made by Ampere around the capability of their AmpereOne processors against Bergamo and Genoa.

For these benchmarks it's worth pointing out Ampere Computing was testing the AMD EPYC servers in just single socket configurations rather than dual socket for better density. Ampere Altra numbers are from CentOS 8 / GCC 10 while the others are on Fedora 38 with GCC 13. The explanation given there is that the Ampere Altra Max numbers are what was shown previously. A bit surprising they went with Fedora 38 for these numbers since F38 will be end-of-life in the coming days and has been out for a year already, as well as surprising they didn't go for RHEL/CentOS 9 or similar. Already beyond Linux 6.3~6.4 kernels used have been more x86_64 and AArch64 kernel improvements. Hopefully we'll get our hands on some AmpereOne hardware soon for a clean comparison against the latest upstream Linux distributions/kernels and other interesting and diverse benchmarks.

Ampere also talked about their FlexSpeed and FlexSKU features of AmpereOne that have reportedly been available features since last year but only now are sheding more light on them given customer interest.

Those are the highlights for today's Ampere Computing roadmap update. AmpereOne (1B) with 256 cores and 12 channel DDR5 memory next year is exciting and great if they can execute and deliver in a timely manner compared to the belated roll-out of AmpereOne. It will be very interesting to see how these current and upcoming AmpereOne processors will compete with the upcoming Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC server processors.